turning grey...

I wrote this post ONE MONTH ago about Max playing up at bedtime. At that time it had already been going on for several weeks. There has been NO improvement and I swear we're going grey, I actually found 4 WHITE hairs this week, ARGGHHH!

We're trying everything, but being so tired and fed up means we're probably not very consistent and so we're not getting anywhere.

To resume, he wakes in the morning between 6.30-7am, this is not exactly uncommon amongst toddlers. Laila was always an early riser, 6.45am for a long time, but she was asleep by 7.30pm every evening so it wasn't a problem.

He still has an afternoon nap, sometimes 3 hours long. Of course you would assume this is where the problem lies, but you try and convince a French childminder or any French mother that a 2yr old does NOT need to sleep so long in the afternoon. They wont accept it. We have 2 weeks left of the childminder, then we'll be free to do what we like!
On the 2 days per week he's home with me alone, I try to put him down for a short nap, but he does the same circus act each time which takes an hour, so either I give up and bring him back downstairs or he eventually goes to sleep.
On the weekend, Daddy can do naptime, its generally a little bit quicker.

By the way, if anyone else is putting him to bed, he goes just fine. This behaviour is stricltly reserved for Mummy or Daddy.

If we go without the nap it changes nothing. Except he gets grumpy at around 6pm.

Bedtime - we start it around 8pm, he eventually goes to sleep around 10pm. We've tried dinner first then bath and bed. Or bath first, then dinner and bed. Makes no difference. Laila goes to sleep immediately, then he starts the performance. At the moment it's less of the "I want" as he was doing a month ago. It's just him getting out of bed every 3 seconds and coming out of his room. We do the return to bed technique, where you silently put them back to bed, repeatedly. But we generally crack after the 100th time (no kidding) and get cross with him. This does have some effect on him and then he might stay in his bed crying a little. Or more often he'll laugh at me, which makes me more cross or makes me cry. Hubby takes over, he sees the game is up and he goes to sleep.
The problem is we can't leave him upstairs awake, because he goes and wakes Laila up wanting to play with her, or he goes in our room and empties everything.

I don't like shutting his door, I worry it will scare him too much. Hubby says me shouting at him is probably more scary than having his door shut. Good point. So I tried holding the door shut. Didn't work.

Something we could try is fitting the stair gate to his door. So he can't get out of the room. I really don't like the idea but we're running out of ideas.

Oh and in case you're wondering why we even took him out of his cot and put him in a bed in the first place....it was because he wasn't sleeping very well in the cot, we thought he might sleep better in a bed. DUH!